Sandwiches and trainspotting

Hi everyone

Since I last posted on this I have:

• finally sent out the invites for my supposed wedding in December (will it really happen??!!)
• finished watching the entire Game of Thrones series (this was a Herculean effort over about 4 weeks and I regret bingeing it so fast but also it was really hard to make myself stop)
• started reading GoT straight after (the saga need not end!). But also it's a bit sad reading it from the beginning again. It's like reminiscing someone who's died (well, way less intense than that, but I remember the day I finished reading HP7 it really did feel like the end of an era...like the end of high school or something and then the first time I picked up the HP books after that was very sentimental)
• been on heaps of sandwich runs! On Saturdays we generally go for longer walks to any place that serves sandwiches and so far all the places we've been to have been so good! shortlist:
• Hector's Deli (ok, we drove to this one after doing some shopping)
• Windsor's Deli (really awesome falafel sandwich)
• Big Dog's Deli (also drove to this one after picking something up from Ikea)
• Rustica in South Yarra (very excited because I had no idea it one existed nearby)
• Stan's Deli (delicious and sooo close)
• Tivoli Rd bakery (really refreshing sandwiches - most of the other ones above serve the saucy, gooey cheesy kind of sandwich but these ones were earthy and fresh)
• started watching Great Asian Railway Journeys in which a brightly-dressed ex-British politician traverses ex-continental SE Asia with his 1913 guidebook (Bradshaw's). He has a big nose. Also it's nice seeing some of the places we visited in the past. We've been watching a lot of railways, I suppose it's the lockdown version of trainspotting. We also watched the movie the Railway Man which is not that amazing but the prisoner-of-war stories reminded us of all the war museums we visited when we were travelling. We went to an ex POW camp in Hanoi and saw the suit John McCain was wearing when he was taken prisoner during the Vietnam War. And speaking of which, here is one of my favourite Twitter threads about this amazing guy.

Some thoughts on Game of Thrones

I started reading the book because after watching the whole series, I wanted to get a better idea of why George R. R. Martin wrote the story the way he did. Since the books are different to the series it only made sense to start the story all over again! :D

While I was watching GoT it was really hard not to root for Daenerys. She started off as a victim and ended up being a slave-freeing hero. It's hard not to be blind-sided by the ending, but it's equally frightful wondering "what went wrong?", "how did I not see this coming earlier?" etc. This scares me because it means I might not notice if I myself were descending into a similar level of extremism where I had so much faith that what I was doing was right that I'd do all manner of evil things and think it was morally ok. 

I suppose the killing of all the slave masters in Meereen, the Sons of the Harpy uprising and Drogon burning that farmer's daughter was a sign of the immense power she had which did not always result in good outcomes. Alarm bells started ringing when she stopped listening to Tyrion! If I've learnt anything about being a leader, or just being a person in general, you want to surround yourself with friends who you trust and aren't afraid to tell you when you're doing something wrong.